The Psychology of a Mother

FRANCOIS MAURIAC gives us a keen analysis of a phase of maternal psychology, saying, “So did our mother appear to me: a creature above all creatures . . . It is strange to think that the most mediocre women and even the most wicked have been in the eyes of their little boy this almost divine being.

“. . . The child must grow, withdraw from his mother; it requires separation for him to judge this creature of whom he was born. It is necessary for her to let this man, her son, try his luck, take risks, love a woman and take her to himself. All that seems simple and in keeping with the wish of nature. Yet, it is just that which gives rise to a drama more often than one would think.

“. . . The hen drives away the grown chick who persists in following her but many women do not have that instinct. In their son, they never see the child die; and this graying man that they wait on, that they scold, is still a little boy to them.”

Further on he says, “As we advance in life, we perceive that man in his declining years has as much need of his mother as when he was a child. In truth, the child in us never dies; as soon as sickness attacks us and disarms us, the child is there again, that demanding child, who needs spoiling, confidence, who wants to be consoled and cradled. And that is why very often, the wife from instinct becomes a mother again at the bedside of this sick man; she assumes for the man whom weakness has reduced to a child the role of the mother who is no longer there.

“Such is perhaps the greatest marvel of the feminine heart—the intermingling of maternal and conjugal love within it, so fused into one that there remains only this tenderness of the wife bending over her wounded and suffering companion; this tenderness of which poor Verlaine dreamed when he wrote these two lines.

“How I am going to love you, beautiful little hands Clasped for a moment, you who will close our eyes.”

Coleridge has said it well.

A mother is a mother still the holiest thing alive.

Unhappily, what has contemporary society not done to “kill the mother.”

In how many places, children are said to belong to the State; they do not even have to take the name of their parents; mothers are merely the material producers of the living persons which the country, the factories, and the army need. Their generative organs are considered. Their heart, not at all!

In other places maternity is so ridiculed that to have a family, particularly a large family, instead of being a glory, is an evidence of simple mindedness, old-fashioned ideas, and stupidity.

Again, selfishness has been developed to such a point that while sterility may not be directly advocated, an immoderate limitation of births has been effected. To be tied down with children! No, thank you!

Before the war, Mauriac justly commented, “Everything takes place in the world as if there existed a leader of gambling, a leader of the ball who feels that to fulfill his designs he must first of all strike at the mother.”

And these last lines have become more timely than ever:

“In the world that it will be necessary to reconstruct, effort will have to bear upon this aim: to restore woman to her true place, to give her back her essential mission.”